Our engineering teams are committed to producing an efficient exchange with superior infrastructure, alongside building deep relationships internally and externally. But who are the people behind what we build?
The data products division at Index builds the foundation for a flexible, scalable, and transparent advertising exchange. We create a wide variety of financial transaction models, ensuring rock-solid data pipelines to our billing systems, while democratising data through our reporting capabilities. Let’s narrow our focus to get to know a few members of one of our data product teams.
I sat down with team members Hardik Patel, staff software engineer, Roza Ismagilova, engineering lead manager, and Shelly Chen, software engineer, to chat about their roles and what it’s like to work at Index.
In your own words, what does the team do?
Roza Ismagilova: We have a broad variety of systems, products, and technologies that we work with daily. Our work encompasses various pieces of finance, such as determining the price of a demand-side platform bid during an auction, setting up new financial incentive programs and billing structures, and generating comprehensive reports that facilitate customer invoicing and payments.
Hardik Patel: At Index, our engineering teams commit to delivering features from inception to implementation, guaranteeing a holistic approach to our work.
In addition to our primary responsibilities, I actively contribute to the coding standards workgroup. Within this collaborative environment, we’re dedicated to setting up robust coding standards specifically tailored for Index engineering, particularly focusing on the Golang programming language. This initiative underscores our dedication to maintaining high-quality code and ensuring the reliability and scalability of our systems.
What are some of the key challenges you’re solving?
Shelly Chen: The most challenging and exciting part of my work comes from the fact that we are dealing with financial information. We need to be extra cautious, as a small flaw or discrepancy may have a substantial impact on our reputation and revenue, along with our customers. Our team has a strong insistence and mindset on data reconciliation and auditing, which I don’t see often in other engineering teams.
RI: That’s true. We must keep in mind that the code we build will be in action billions of times each day. This not only creates many interesting challenges with performance and scale, but also requires that we keep our quality bar very high.
HP: I agree. Over time, we’ve raised our quality standards and refined our processes, enabling each engineer to consistently meet these heightened expectations. Every aspect of our development prioritises auditability, with our product designs crafted to ensure the highest levels of transparency and traceability.
How does your work make an impact?
RI: The features we develop help our company bring in new business and improve existing customer offerings by providing new financial incentives. This helps us stay ahead in the very competitive world of ad tech.
HP: Our team recently introduced several new capabilities for Index Marketplace partners. We’ve enabled these partners to take their existing business models and apply them on top of the exchange. At the same time, we’ve created an entirely new business model for Index, which is exciting!
What’s been the best part about your experience working at Index?
SC: Index and my team are super supportive. One of our core values is, “Support each other. It matters.” My team is the best example of that.
As a new mom who just experienced pregnancy and took parental leave, I can’t thank Index and my team enough. There were great parental leave benefits and plenty of support getting back to work.
RI: Index has continued to provide me with new opportunities that allowed me to grow both as a software engineer and a leader throughout the years, which is very important to me. Index engineering constantly evolves and offers new challenges. It’s kept things fresh and exciting, even after over a decade of being an Indexer.
If you’re looking for a career in technology where you can make a significant impact, we want to hear from you. Learn more about working at Index and check out our open roles.
